


stay a stranger

by toadpuff



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Gaslighting, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-31
Updated: 2016-05-31
Packaged: 2018-07-11 06:33:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7033771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toadpuff/pseuds/toadpuff
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>undercover spy becomes too gay to function, ruins own life</p>
            </blockquote>





	stay a stranger

**Author's Note:**

> title from secret agent man by devo

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK  
11/08  
02:46

It was stupid, going back to the apartment. Week I had, though, I figured I deserved a little self-indulence, and the romantic in me liked the poetry of finishing everything where I’d started it.

There was caution tape crossing the doorway, which only sported a half-door now after being kicked mostly off its hinges. I tore the tape down–WHISPR had been through already, and there would be no police investigation–and stepped over the remains of the mirror that used to hang on the wall in the entryway. There was blood dried on the spiderwebbed cracks. I couldn’t remember if it was hers or mine; we’d both donated a pint or two to the interior design scheme. 

I didn’t bother going into the kitchen, but noted the upended table and gleaming silver graveyard of forks and knives and spoons scattered all over the linoleum as I passed. The refrigerator’s crumpled door was hanging open, so I kicked it shut. I stopped in the wreckage of the living room, took in the bloodstained couch (vomiting stuffing out of several deep KA-BAR slashes in the brown leather), the broken television (destroyed screen, ripped off the wall with the force of a body hitting it), the bullet holes peppering the wall. I crossed the room and pressed my fingertip into one of them. Exactly eye-level. Only one of the framed photographs remained up and intact, the rest lying on the floor against the wall. I pulled the frame off its hook and tugged the back away, taking the picture and dropping the rest. 

It had been taken two years before, in Death Valley. I had been undercover at a global business summit in Vegas while Nadia was there on WHISPR orders. Nadia’s assignment had wrapped up, and she’d come to visit me during the downtime between conferences. I had to be believable, especially because she was there. 

“Just to see it,” she’d said, when I asked why she'd dragged me out to the barren wasteland. “It’s pretty, it’s important.”

“It’s flat.” I’d answered, shielding my eyes from the glaring sun. I wanted to go back to my motel and sleep before I had to spend another six and a half hours listening to people in power suits talk about making economic disasters work for you. “And hot.”

Nadia had laughed and put her enormous straw hat on my head to keep the sun out of my face, then jogged over to a woman in a WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS IS SEEN BY THE LORD shirt who was standing by the bathroom, waiting for her son and husband to emerge. She whispered to the woman, handed her the burner phone she was using, and jogged back over to me. “Say Jesus!” the woman called sweetly, grinning as she held the phone up. Nadia gave her a huge open-mouth smile and wrapped her arms around me. I adjusted my head so that the hat wasn’t in her face and gave my trademark uncomfortable bared-teeth crocodile grin. The woman snapped a few shots, and handed the phone back just as her family came out.

“I look like a shitty ventriloquist with the world’s scariest dummy.” she said, snorting and showing me the picture. The horribleness of it startled a laugh out of me. “I love it.”

“It looks like somebody’s gonna find it in a fucked-up crime scene house and immediately know we were responsible for all the murders.” I answered. She had kissed me then, knocking the hat back a little bit in her haste. I checked for the family in my periphery, but they’d piled into their car already and were pulling out of the little parking lot to continue on down the road. Her slim hands, cool despite the heat, brushed over my neck right before she pulled away. “I love you.” I told her.

“I love you, too.” She took my hand and led me toward the convertible she’d managed to swing from the agency. “Come on. I’ve only got four hours until my flight leaves and I want to spend them with you.”

And she had. We’d driven through the desert, sipping rapidly warming Cokes and listening to the Boney M. cd the last agent to requisition the car had left behind. I was exhausted, but her enthusiasm was endearing as she rattled off historical and geographical facts, and I fell asleep to her explaining the sailing stones of the Racetrack Playa. It had been a good day, and even though she was supposed to destroy the phone, she’d had a copy of the picture printed at the airport beforehand, framed, and hung by the time I got back a week later.

I’d been holding the picture when she asked me to move in with her, and I’d still been holding it when she’d kissed me in excitement, and when she’d run out to grab a pizza and given me time to step onto the fire escape and call my handler to report the new development. 

“This is moving way faster than we thought it would.” James Verity had told me, pleased. “How do you make these targets like you so much? I’ve met you, babe. You’re not that great.” 

“Why the fuck would I be interested in making you like me?” I had asked, putting the picture back up when I stepped back inside. I didn’t wait for him to answer, just hung up when I heard Nadia’s key in the lock. We had eaten pizza, watched High Plains Drifter, and gone to bed. I had watched her for a long time after she fell asleep, taking in the way the moonlight filtered through the blinds and striped over her face. I took stock of her, categorized, compartmentalized. Analyzed the way she slept, on her back with her arms at her sides. Eyes shuddering slightly beneath her lids, twitching her long eyelashes. Her soft full mouth was partially open, her breathing even. I watched her sleep enough over that three years that I could tell when she started to dream.

That was over now, though. I dropped the picture onto the splintered coffee table and made my way to the bedroom. I pushed aside the bloody mattress and cracked box spring to get through the door. The window was broken where I’d gone through it and dropped three stories into the Dumpster below. Seeing the splash of blood on the wall beneath the sill made the roughly-stitched gunshot wound to my right flank flare into a deep ache even through the painkillers, and I grimaced as I walked into the bathroom, the only intact room in the apartment. WHISPR had removed everything of mine from the apartment and most of Nadia's belongings as well, and that included anything useful from the medicine cabinet.

I checked my visible injuries in the mirror. Among the worst were the bullet wound in my side, the black eye swollen shut and purple down to my jaw, and the lip busted so hard it curled up and away from my top teeth on one side. I pulled the v-neck of my shirt down to inspect the stitching on the knife gash across my chest, from the top of my left shoulder to beneath my right breast. It was haphazard, but the vet tech I’d forced at gunpoint to keep my insides inside had been shaking so badly it was a miracle she managed to get the thing closed up at all. I had two broken fingers and a sprained knee, a bruised rib or two. I’d be a little deaf in one ear until my ruptured eardrum healed and might end up pissing blood for a little while, but all in all, I’d recovered from worse. I wasn’t the one in the hospital, at least, though I probably should have been.

“Holy shit, Wiley, you look like a fucking industrial trash compactor found you on top of his girlfriend.” James Verity said as he came into the room. I didn’t jump, but it was close. My hearing was more damaged than I thought if I hadn’t heard him clomping in. “Daramy’s unconscious but stable. I can get you in to finish the job if you’re interested in revenge for how she stomped you into paste.”

I sighed, ragged in my swollen trachea. “This shit wasn’t about revenge. Somebody ratted me, and Nadia and I mutually–lovingly–made the decision to Thunderdome it out.” I turned to look at Verity. “If I find out you had anything to do with blowing my cover, I will cut your tongue out and shove it up your ass.”

“Stop flirting. And you know this wasn’t me.”

“Then who was it?”

Verity shook his head, stepping up next to me to inspect the broken window. “It doesn’t matter anymore, does it? You achieved your objective. You tilled the earth for us, and now we can plant our seeds in WHISPR’s fertile soil.”

“That how Kincade sold it to you? Gardening metaphors?”

Verity didn’t answer, just shrugged and pulled the duffel bag he was carrying off of his shoulder. “Grabbed your bugout kit, got you on the next train to HQ for the debrief, and booked you a cabin for a few weeks in the Blue Ridge Mountains for some R&R, contingent on you going to a real hospital instead of terrorizing a dog nurse.”

“She did all right.” I answered absently, unzipping the bag to do a supply check. Cash sewn into the lining, passport, real ID, fake ID, extra socks and underwear, elephant-killer stun gun disguised as pink flea market stun gun, baton disguised as an umbrella, knife disguised as a fake souvenir from Mexico, speed, Midol, tampons, a spare pair of my favorite sunglasses, a small first aid kit, an Epipen in case of bees, a flash drive containing an encrypted list of human resources and contacts I had, listed by country, that same list in a code only I knew written on paper and sewn into the lining opposite the spare cash, and and a box of power bars. “I had a book in here.” I said, testing the blade of the knife on my jeans. The bag had been thrown together hastily, and I wasn’t sure if everything in it was even still functioning.

“Yeah, and it was boring, so I left it in the locker. The train has wifi.”

“Fuck you.” I told him, suddenly weak. I sat down hard on the nightstand and felt it rock beneath me. I hadn’t slept for more than an hour or two in the last three days, and the painkillers, exhaustion, and sheer magnitude of punishment my body had soaked up was draining my will to stay upright. I had to get out before I passed out, but I couldn’t make myself move. 

Verity could. He pulled me back to my feet. “Up and at ‘em, killer. Dead or alive, you gotta be on that train.” I was grateful for his solid grip and that he finally felt comfortable enough to hold me close, instead of at an awkward distance like we were father-daughter dancing at a purity ball. I’d worked almost as hard on him as I had on Nadia, and his trust in me–putting me this close to his body with a knife in my hand–was due to my efforts, not his naievete. 

“I will be, Jamie, I promise.” I told him. He looked down at me, his smile confused but pleased with the nickname. I turned into his body, lifting my arm to put it over his and lock it against me as I stuck the knife into the side of his neck, just under his jawbone, and forced it out the hard way. I let him go and his hands flew to his open throat, fingers slipping inside as he tried and failed to put himself back together. I waited until he’d staggered and fallen down onto the boxspring and bled out before washing my hands and rinsing my knife off in the sink. I tossed it into the trash chute on my way to the stairwell. 

I didn’t know if he’d been the one to betray me, or if Nadia had, in fact, just figured me out on her own. There was no real damning evidence in either direction, but the fact that my mission had required us to be the only two operatives with the ability to out me didn’t look good for him. Nadia was out of the picture, and Verity was, as I’d been informed, an acceptable loss if I wished to tie up all my loose ends. 

The street was dark and silent, snow falling gently out of the purplish sky to clump at the edges of the sidewalk, slushing into a dirty gray at the curb. I stopped at the diner that Nadia had loved and got myself a cup of coffee and a few minutes with their landline. It rang once before a voice, soft with sleep, said “Ileana?”

“How’d you know it was me?” I asked. 

“I wasn’t expecting anyone else.” Andrea Kincade answered. It wouldn’t have been a good answer from anyone but her. Kincade was one of those people who never expected anything to happen that didn’t end up actually happening, exactly as she expected it to, like the universe worked itself out around her schedule. It was impressive. “You sound awful.”

“I feel awful.” I assured her. My body was so close to shutting down of its own free will that I could feel my brain getting slow. That was never a good thing when talking to Kincade, so I just said “Verity’s out. It’s done.” 

Her answering sigh was a little more disapproving than I thought it would be. “James Verity will be a pain to replace.” she told me, gently irritated.

“I didn’t want to leave that door open, in case it was letting flies in.” I said, leaning against the counter to take some of the weight off my knee.

Kincade laughed gently. I wondered who she was trying not to wake up. “You’re very thorough.”

“I’m a spy. What would I be worth without a little paranoia?” 

She laughed again. “You wouldn’t be worth the wood of your casket. Consider yourself debriefed. I expect you back in at the office no later than Monday at 0900. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Good girl. Get some rest.” She hung up abruptly.

“Bye.” I said to the dead line, and set the phone back into its cradle. I ordered another coffee and a pile of blueberry pancakes to go and walked another four blocks to the Holiday Inn Express. The night desk woman tried to keep the sympathy off her face as she took in the bruises on mine. After I paid and she handed me my room key, she glanced out at the empty lobby before quietly saying “If you need–If you need some help, I can get a police officer here right away.”

I smiled at her, as genuine as I could manage with my fucked-up face and lack of interest in the conversation, and said it wouldn’t be necessary. I thanked her, took note of the HEATHER stamped on her name badge. I filled out the little how was your stay card on the nightstand when I got to my room, complimenting her service. 

I forced myself to stay awake long enough to wolf down the pancakes and get a shower. I’d spent the few nights since losing my cover squatting in an empty office building while WHISPR went over Nadia’s apartment and conducted their rapid investigation of the situation, and I looked, smelled, and felt disgusting. 

The Waverlin-Harvard International Security and Protection Resource, nominally a security agency but secretly a government-affiliated clandestine organization, wouldn’t have found anything useful about me. I didn’t exist, not in a way they would have been able to suss out. Not to brag, but the firm I worked for were so clandestine they didn’t even have a name, much less a government affiliation. We specialized in infiltration and destruction, unbalancing and ripping things apart from the inside. The work suited me and I liked it, even when it ended with me bleeding. Slipping into identities and then slipping into people’s lives was the thing I was best at, a skill I hadn’t realized was marketable outside of small-time con jobs in Oklahoma dive bars until Andrea Kincade had come to me in prison and offered me a place in her organization like it was a bendiction. 

You’re nobody, she had said kindly. I could use a girl like you. I was, and she did, and eleven years on, I was still nobody. And because of that, I could be everybody. Who else has that kind of job satisfaction?

But. The hardest thing about becoming what you need to be is always going back to what you are. Even if that’s nobody.

I’d put it off until I finished my job, but I was just worn down enough for it to find me in the shower. It hit like a wave, the usual gut-twisting panic attack that pulled the breath out of my lungs and knocked my legs out from under me until I had to slide to the floor of the tub and figure out how to put Lauren Velasco down like a beloved old dog. 

I’d spent three years being her, doing the work she did and liking the things she liked and loving the woman she loved. In order to craft yourself into another person, some part of it always has to be as real for you as it is for your mark, and since finance is boring and I hate Westerns and French food and karaoke and birds and all the things Lauren Velasco enjoyed, that part was always Nadia.

I knew Nadia well enough to know that seeing me dry-heaving in a bathtub over her would at least tempt her to overcome whatever hate she felt toward me for betraying her, maybe. She was always very nurturing and protective for someone whose job routinely involved aggressively interrogating people in dark, windowless rooms. Nadia could disconnect better than me, be one person at work and another person at home, didn’t let any one aspect of her life subsume the rest. I admired that. 

No. I hated that.

I followed the shimmering beacon of that resentment until I could blink the dark spots out of my eyes and control my breathing again. The water had gone lukewarm, so I pulled myself back to my feet with the safety bar and finished showering, finished clearing the fog from my head as I dried off and combed my hair out with my fingers. I smiled when my nails scraped over a scabby bald patch buried at the back of my skull; something else to remember Nadia by. I popped five of the Novartis caplets I’d stolen from the vet’s office and winced. Human painkillers would be a priority. 

I pulled on clean underwear and slid the stun gun beneath my pillow as I collapsed onto the bed, not bothering to pull the ugly blanket over myself. The first weak glare of sunlight slipped through the small gaps in the curtain, but the room was dark and cold enough to put me to sleep within minutes. 

I dreamed about the desert, Nadia’s warm arm slung around my neck, Nadia’s warm blood in my mouth. Cracked earth stretched around us all the way to the purple mountains in the distance. Vultures circled above. 

“This desert is the flattest driest place in the world.” she was saying, in her best Attenborough accent. “Home to many animals, such as those crazy poison lizards and a bird or two, maybe.”

None of that sounded right, but since this was a dream, she only knew what I misremembered from seventh grade biology and wilderness survival training instead of everything. “Look at this.” she said, pointing at our feet. “An Eastern diamondback rattlesnake.”

“We’re in the west.” I argued, but she shushed me and knelt down, forcing me to follow her. The snake twisted in on itself and bit its rattle, drawing its tail in inch by inch until it scraped up its insides enough that blood welled out of its mouth around the intrusion. That didn’t deter it from its mission. 

“Look at that. You wanna know the scary thing about it?”

“No.”

“That snake’s gonna stop swallowing someday.” She smiled at me, teeth bloody. “Then what?”

+++++

VIRGINIA  
11/11  
08:47

“Welcome home!” someone yelled from across the office floor as I stepped out of the elevator. I waved in their general direction and didn’t bother answering. I’d run out of vet pills the night before and whiskey’d myself to sleep for the bus ride back to Richmond, which meant I was hungover on top of the searing agony of my body. I envied Nadia’s coma.

Kincade’s door was shut when I reached her office. I tapped it a few times with my water bottle to spare my swollen knuckles. Kincade didn’t open it; instead, I was met with Jennifer Thibodeaux’s sullen face, which brightened my mood considerably. Any moment Jenny was unhappy where I could witness it added a good two weeks to my natural lifespan. 

The reverse was true for her, because her eyes lit up when she saw the state I was in. “Finally,” she whispered, just loud enough for me to hear, and stepped back to gesture me into the office. I sat down in one of the big chairs across from Kincade—oxblood, studded leather, cost more than my motorcycle. The office had a nice view of the city skyline, draped in fog as it was that morning,  but Jenny started talking immediately and I didn’t get a chance to enjoy it. 

“Like I was saying, in her condition, I don’t feel that Agent Wiley is up for taking another assignment so soon, even if it's in a more…administrative capacity. My paperwork is all up to date, I passed my fitness test and my physical fifteen days ago with perfect feedback on both, and while Agent Wiley was off playing house, I’ve been researching WHISPR and am fully prepared to begin laying the groundwork for my own undercover operation to accomplish what she didn’t.”

“Wait, what didn’t I accomplish?” I asked, frowning. “I pulled a linchpin out and got you shit that could, literally, end WHISPR tomorrow.”

Jenny gave me a fake conciliatory smile. “You brought down one high-level operative and passed us a lot of crucial intel over the past few years, but I feel like, going forward, a more proactive approach would be best. Infiltrate the organization instead of the people.”

It hurt to roll my eyes, but I made that sacrifice. “Boss, even if I didn’t need a morphine drip and two weeks in bed, all this–” I waved my hand dismissively toward Jenny. “–would be too much to deal with nonviolently. I advise that you let her do whatever it is she thinks she can do better than me, and when it blows up in her face, I’ll debrief her myself. Won’t even make fun of her too bad.”

Kincade smiled at Jenny when she opened her mouth to argue. Jenny’s mouth snapped shut like a cartoon and she sat back a little in her seat. “I didn’t bring you here to bitch at each other like a couple of teenagers.” Kincade told us calmly, still smiling like a benevolent mother. “You’re here so I can tell you that you’re going to be working together. Agent Thibodeaux, you’re a promising operative and an excellent strategist. But you’re untested, and frankly a bit cockier than I’m comfortable with. Agent Wiley, your skill and experience will be a good learning resource for Agent Thibodeaux, and hopefully her ability to plan more than one step ahead will rub off on you so you quit limping back to me after every assignment with more holes than God gave you.” 

“That’s a fair assessment of us.” Jenny answered automatically, like she was trying to convince herself. The criticism didn’t bother me enough to answer, but I was somewhat interested in Jenny’s unwillingness to fight Kincade on it. 

Kincade nodded at her before she leaned down to grab two dark green folders out of her desk and pass one to each of us. “Two targets, full dossiers on both. Clear a path, gain access, get what you need, and dispose of them. I want Agent Wiley to take two months to heal and for you both to formulate a plan of action before you begin. We can’t afford a mistake on this.”

“Yes, ma'am.” Jenny said dutifully as I opened the folder closest to me. Semyon Chernikov, former KGB, defected convincingly enough to work his way up to second in command at WHISPR. 

The second was– 

“Wait.” I said, holding up the second dossier. 

Kincade smiled like she was bestowing a gift. “She woke up at at four-thirty this morning.” 

I stared at the picture in the file, acutely aware of two sets of eyes boring into my head. “So it’s too late to just kill her, right?” I muttered, just to fill the silence. 

Kincade just laughed. At me, not with me. 

“I can take Daramy. She doesn’t know me.” Jenny said. “I can be a friend in her time of need.”

I shook my head. “It took me six months to get her to trust me enough to let me into her apartment, and she hadn’t just had everything in her life torn to shreds and burned in front of her. There’s no angle to get in with her here, and I’ve exhausted every possible use she could have to us. I don’t see why she’s important.”

“Call me paranoid, but it sounds like you’re trying to protect her somehow.” Jenny told me. I forced myself not to dignify that with a response. “Like I said, I’ll take care of your girlfriend. You can handle Chernikov, right?”

“You’re working together, ladies.” Kincade said before I could answer with something that would have landed me in HR anywhere else. “I didn’t make this decision lightly, and wouldn’t have made it at all if I didn’t think you’d be a successful team. Do either of you question my judgement?”

“No, ma'am.” we said in unison, which seemed to delight Kincade.

“Good. Get out of my office. Wiley, take a fucking nap.”

Dismissed, Jenny and I walked back out to the floor. Jenny stopped at her cubicle and turned to me. “I’m sorry for giving you a hard time. I think there’s a lot I can learn from you, and a lot you can learn from me.” she said, almost convincingly sincere. 

I smiled at her, the grin extra nightmarish on my ruined face. “Go fuck yourself.”

*****

I didn't end up taking a nap, but was stuck socializing until everyone scattered at lunchtime and left me alone. Once I got free, I called a cab to take me to Blou Ball's, the best bar in town. Mainly by virtue of it being open all the time and within staggering distance of my apartment. Which I suddenly remembered I hadn't set foot in for three years, so I'd be staggering into a barren bedless wasteland. I swore quietly and thought about asking the driver to turn around (at least the office had a few cots scattered around for operatives in the limbo days just before or after assignments), but he had already pulled into the gravel lot at Blou Ball's and was waiting expectantly for his payment. I shook my head to clear the cotton out and tore the lining of my bag, extracting three twenties and passing them to him. 

“Keep the change.” I said, forcing myself to exit the cab as smoothly as possible despite my body doing its best to collapse like a sack of potatoes. The cab peeled out of the lot almost before I shut the door behind me, and I swayed for a minute before heading for the door. The lot was empty save for a rusty Escort and Lou Ball's ancient Bronco. The Bronco was still pitted down the driver's side from where his ex-wife had unloaded about a hundred dollars' worth of buckshot into it, but he'd fixed the taillight his ex-girlfriend had smashed since I'd been gone. 

I pulled the front door open and stepped into the welcoming gloom. Neon beer signs, talk radio playing over the speakers for the daytime losers who came to Drink instead of to drink, the smell of thirty years of the kind of folks who'd drink at a bar called Blou Ball's, and a vague sense that anything you touched would be sticky (confirmed once you actually touched something) all embraced me immediately like the weird uncle at the family reunion. Lou was at the end of the bar, leaned over it and deep in conversation with an old man who I figured for the owner of the Escort.

Lou glanced up quickly, then did a double take. I dropped my bag on the bar so I could lean against it casually and get the weight off my knee. “Yo.” I greeted. “Miss me?”

“Depends, jackass, you gonna settle your tab before disappearing for five years this time?” Lou answered, abandoning Escort to stalk down toward me. The lighting wasn't great, so he didn't appear to notice the state I was in until he got close. “Christ, you skip out on paying someone else, too?”

“Two years, ten months, and no.”

“No you didn't skip out on somebody, or no you're not gonna pay me?”

I shrugged as delicately as I could. “Just no.”

Lou shook his big head, and reached behind him for a bottle of vodka. The cheap stuff—he was sympathetic to the state I was in, but not the state I'd left him in. Which I honestly hadn't meant to do, but the window for getting in with Nadia was very small, and I didn't have time to settle up most of my affairs before going. Kincade had taken care of my apartment and my bike and even the copy of Wild Seed I'd checked out of the library, but paying an operative's delinquent bar tab wasn't high on the organization's priority list. 

While he poured the liquor out over a few ice cubes, I pulled more cash from the lining of my bag and set it down on the bar next to the filmy glass he pushed across to me. “You're a mess.” he said. “You can keep your money if you tell me what happened.” He smiled, crooked teeth dull in the low light. “If it was girl trouble, you drink free today.”

“You're nosy as shit, you know that?” I said, climbing gingerly onto the seat at the bar. Thankfully, it had a back, so I could slump as much as I wanted to. I sipped the vodka. It was disgusting, and the glass tasted greasy, but the alcohol burn and chill from the ice felt good on the split inside my cheek. 

“ _Was_ it girl trouble?” Lou leaned forward, conspiratorially. “You step out on her?” he whispered.

I frowned. “You asking if I deserved this, Lou?” I asked, gesturing to my face. 

He held up both hands. “I deserved what happened to the Bronco. I don't know if it works differently with the gays.”

“You're a fucking idiot.” I said, trying my best to keep from tearing something when I laughed. “It doesn't work differently, by the way. And it wasn't girl trouble.” Not in a way I could explain to him, anyway.

His expression turned sympathetic. “You get bashed?”

“Oh my god. No, Lou, I was not domestically abused or hate crimed. It was work-related. Will you please take my money and stop running your mouth so I can get shitfaced in peace?”

Lou stepped back and set the vodka bottle down next to my elbow. “Keep your money. Slate's clean and I'm glad you're back, and if you tell anyone I said that, you're gonna eat that fucking bottle.” I didn't answer, just raised my glass and zipped my money back into my bag. I took the bottle back to a booth and set to work finishing it as fast as I could without vomiting. 

The pain was excruciating but constant, which meant I could compartmentalize it. I'd have to go to the hospital at some point, but Doctor Vodka and Nurse Handful Of Hydrocodone Pills I Took Out Of Someone's Locker On The Way Out Of The Office were helping immensely. I glazed over quickly but kept at the bottle like a good drinker, and didn't notice that there was only about an eighth of it left until someone sat down across from me and said “There's only an eighth of the bottle left. Please tell me you didn't drink the whole thing.”

I sighed and closed my eyes. “I'm gonna say this nicely once out of respect for Kincade. Get the fuck out of here before I turn you into a permanent part of this fucking floor.” I said. Some of the menace was probably leached out by the fact that I couldn't get my eyes to open again and my head was hanging halfway to the table. I forced myself upright to stare at Jenny Thibodeaux. “You follow me?”

She shrugged. “I got your address from your personnel file and figured you were still too far under to want to go straight home. This was the grossest bar in the area.” 

I snorted. “What, I don't strike you as the Four Seasons lounge type?”

“I don't know what type you are, Agent Wiley.” Jenny said, shaking her head gently. Her smooth ponytail caught and reflected the light off the Budweiser sign, and the blue glow of the Coors sign glanced off her cheekbones and forehead, put an eerie shine into her green eyes. I closed my own again. “But I know right now that you're still trying to dig yourself out of your cover's grave, and I know that you're not in a good place--” She cut herself off when I started laughing. I slouched down further in the booth, the cracked leather peeling and curling against my back as I moved. I didn't say anything, so she waited a minute before continuing. “I also know you don't like me.”

“And yet you're bothering me now.”

“And I know you don't want to work with me, but I've been giving it some thought and I honestly believe we could be a great team.”

“Really? Because a couple of hours ago you were talking a _lot_ of shit.”

Jenny blinked, and glanced quickly at the barred window to her left. There was a dusty curtain over it that she reached over and pulled to the side before letting it fall back into place. “It's 18:30. Have you been here this entire time?”

I opened my eyes again, twisting my watch around so I could see it without lifting my arm. It took a few bleary seconds to make out the time, but Jenny was right. Drinking until I lost time was going to have to be the second problem I addressed, right after getting Jenny Thibodeaux out of my face. “Fine, _several_ hours ago, you were talking a lot of shit. We hate each other, and I'm perfectly comfortable with that relationship, whether we have to work together or not.”

“I don't hate you, that's the thing.” Jennifer answered earnestly, even leaning forward to physically drive her point home. “I admire you. I think you're abrasive, yes, and your approach to your work is just—bizarre, and seems unhealthy to me, but I've read all your reports. You're someone I'd genuinely like to learn from.”

I dumped the last of the vodka into my glass and downed it warm, wincing at the entire experience. “You are a very good liar, Jennifer.” I told her eventually. She didn't bother denying it, just settled back with her arms folded and sighed. “I don't know what kind of profile you think you've put together on me, but I can guarantee you it's wrong.”

It was Jenny's turn to snort derisively. “It's wrong because you're not even remotely the same person you were yesterday, and you'll be different tomorrow. You realize that's objectively weird, right?” I conceded with a halfhearted shrug. She rolled her eyes, but there was an almost good-natured smirk alongside it. “The organization hired me because I can figure things out.”

“You're good at patterns. Reducing things to their component parts.”

She pointed at me, finger wagging slightly, as if to admonish me for knowing her better than she knew me. “Not yours, though. I've tried. I went to the Four Seasons first, you know? Then I went to a sports bar, then your apartment, then hit two other places before I even got to this one, and I honestly had no real hope you'd even be here. And I don't know _why_ you're here, either.”

“Atmosphere.”

She sighed again. “I really do want to work with you. Let me drive you home so you don't die in a ditch, and I promise we can do this assignment on your terms.”

“I don't even have a bed.” I said, curling my fingers into my hand like it was something difficult to admit. I had an idea—not a nice one, but one that would stumble her a little on her journey of self-discovering me. Not that I was worried she'd ever manage it, but the assignment would flow a lot smoother if I gave her what she wanted—someone to figure out.

She looked slightly taken aback, but composed herself quickly. “You should probably spend the night at my apartment then. I have a couch.”

“Hell no.” I told her, getting up as gracefully as I could, which was not at all. I pulled the strap of my bag over my head and kept my stumbling to a minimum. Like I figured she would, she got up and, without touching me, did her best to steer me out the doors and to her car, a tasteful black BMW. I let her do it, keeping the reluctance and annoyance on my face for the entire ten-minute drive back to her place. 

Her building was nice enough that the doorman looked concerned about the rough-looking brown miscreant who had clearly taken one of his WASPy tenants hostage, despite Jenny's reassuring smile and greeting to him when he let us in. She lived on the sixth floor in a big one-bedroom decorated like a particularly tasteful spread out of a Williams-Sonoma catalogue, and her view of the skyline was almost as magnificent as the one in Kincade's office. I wondered briefly how she'd landed a place this nice, but then remembered that Kincade hadn't pulled everybody who worked at the organization straight out of solitary. Jenny had come from money.

“Nice digs.” I said, dropping my bag on the coffee table and looking around. 

“All the hepcats seem to think so, daddyo.” Jenny answered with an amused snort. “Was your cover a time traveller from 1950?”

“You know what my cover was.” I told her, circling the room, straddling the line between looking confident in new surroundings and seeming invasive and offputting. 

“Do you want dinner? I have a drawer full of takeout menus I never get to use.” I looked over at her, and she shrugged. “I always eat healthy unless there's company. You don't look like the salmon and asparagus type. Plus, I don't think fish and veggies can soak up all that drain cleaner you put away.”

I considered the offer for a little too long before saying “I could kill a pizza now. Yeah. Fuck it, go ahead.” I sat down hard on her boxy modern couch and added “We'll have a girls' night. Paint our nails and take Cosmo quizzes, it'll be fun.”

“The only magazines I get are Vogue and Soldier of Fortune, so you're SOL on finding out what kind of girlfriend you are.” Jenny called from the kitchen. I could hear her rifling through papers. She came out and sat in the chair across from the couch, phone in one hand and a menu in the other. “Well, I guess Nadia Daramy knows the answer to that one already, doesn't she?” she added, shit-eating grin coming easy enough that, while I knew she didn't necessarily like me, she still liked me more than I liked her. In a friendly or romantic relationship, that imbalance is disastrous. When running a game on somebody, that imbalance is the first checkpoint on your way in. 

I gave her a fake dirty look as she put the phone up to her ear, and turned on her giant television when she started ordering. She was in the middle of an old episode of some reality show, fortuitously paused right as a blonde in a bikini was about to get shoved in a pool by a second blonde in a bikini. I left the screen up until she sat back down in the chair with her work bag on the floor in front of her. “I hope you like deep dish.” she said. “If not, I don't care, that's what I ordered.”

“So you got bad taste in everything, huh.” I said, gesturing to the tv.

She sat up straighter, not embarrassed but still ready to defend herself. “Actually, they taught us in training that reality television is a great way to practice picking up microexpressions and body language, you know? It's fake, obviously, but these people can't act, so I like to study them. Find the discrepancies between what they're saying and what they're doing.”

“And sometimes you just wanna watch somebody get shoved in a pool?”

“And sometimes I just wanna watch somebody get shoved in a pool.” She opened her bag and pulled her laptop out. “I had Hillard digitize and encrypt the dossiers so I could bring them home. I wasn't expecting to have you here, but now that you are, how do you feel about starting work a little early? I know Kincade told you to rest up, but you don't really listen to Kincade on anything--”

“Unless it involves me taking a paid vacation. Then I listen.”

“You don't want to, though, do you? I know you're really fucked up—and you should go to the hospital and then schedule a psych session with Doctor Lee, you're going to end up permanently crippled or with sepsis or something. Not to mention the mental damage your whole schtick is inevitably going to cause you, if it hasn't happened already—but this is an opportunity to get ahead on this. Really show Kincade what we're made of.”

“Kincade knows what I'm made of. You're the one who has to prove yourself.”

“And as much as it pains me and disgusts me and horrifies me to say this, I now have to rely on you for that.” She pointedly sat forward again. I wondered what leadership seminar she'd learned that trick at, and whether she thought it'd work on me. “My future depends on the work you do. I can hold up my end. I need you to be on your game for yours.”

I didn't answer her, just watched her as I pressed play on her remote. There was a scream, a splash, and a bleeped-out “Stop talking so much shit, you fucking bitch!” from the girl on dry land as soon as the other one resurfaced. Jenny looked at the television, then back at my obnoxious grinning face, her eyebrows up. “I watched this episode when it aired.” I explained. “Did you know I invented that reality tv thing you learned? I needed a way to justify why I was always watching _Flavor of Love_ on company time.”

Jenny opened her laptop and tapped out her login information. “I didn't know that, no. Creative way to call me a bitch, though. Really cute.” 

I changed the input on the television with a sigh. “If you want to pout about it, go ahead, but the _point_ of that was to let you know that A, I don't appreciate being condescended to by someone with four years as an analyst when I have gunshot wounds that have been on more field assignments than you have, and B, I'm never _off_ my game. Put Chernikov's dossier up and stop acting like you're gonna be carrying me through this assignment. It's pissing me off, and frankly, I don't have the energy to get offended and storm out right now.” 

Jenny did what I asked, filling the tv screen with Semyon Chernikov's scowling face. “I'm just nervous, is all.” she admitted quietly.

“I don't care. We're going to complete this assignment whether you got your big girl pants on or not.” Jenny made a face. “I'm dead serious. If you fuck it up, you fuck it up, but I will get it done. You won't like me, but you'll trust me.”

“And are you going to trust me?”

“I don't have to trust you, because I trust me. Welcome to two-man ops. You're gonna fucking hate 'em.”  


+++++

  
Jenny and I stayed up until three a.m. scouring Chernikov's hundred-and-thirty-page dossier. He'd started out as a KGB street-level thug before working his way up to middle management with a careful combination of asskissing, blackmail, and murder. He secretly defected in the mid-eighties, maintaining his position but working as a CIA spy until the komitet's dissolution in 1991, at which point the CIA had no further use for him and put him out in the cold. He joined WHISPR in 1997 as middle management, and with a careful combination of asskissing, blackmail, and murder, he became the deputy director in 2007. And that was just the first eighty pages.

“An American success story.” Jenny said, stifling a yawn and looking at her watch. “I'm done for the night, I think. You?”

“I was done four hours ago.” I answered. I moved the plate of room-temperature pizza remains off my chest and onto the coffee table as I sat up from my supine position on the couch, stretching my aching, drowsing body. 

“Hang on, I'll get you a pillow and blanket.” Jenny told me tiredly, stumbling a little over the empty pizza box next to her chair before she picked up the box, our dishes, and the six empty bottles of unpleasant locally-brewed craft beer we'd finished between us and deposited the mess in the kitchen. I watched her walk past me and into the short hallway, where she retrieved an old quilt and a new pillow an dropped them next to me. She disappeared into her room and came back out with a pair of flannel pants and a gray t-shirt with YALE on the front. “Wear these. You've been in those clothes for at least two days.”

“Abruptly ending deep cover is always hell on the wardrobe options.” I informed her, taking the clothes. I stood up and shucked off my shirt and jeans as efficiently as possible, frowning at her tiny yelp. “I wasn't aware you were such a tender virgin, Jenny. You know my body is gonna be pretty naked inside your clothes, right?”

“I'm—I'm not, it's not that, it's—god, how are you still standing?” She took a few steps closer to me and bent down slightly to look at my torso, which might have been fairly indistinguishable from a prop corpse on one of the less conscientious tv shows about people being creatively murdered. It looked so disgusting that I took a strange sort of pride in it. My stitched wounds had bled sluggishly due to all the movement and drinking and the bruising had spread over almost the entirety of my abdomen, livid black-violet in some places and muddy green in others. 

I saw her right hand, balled up and braced on her right thigh, uncurl slightly. “If you're thinking about touching me, don't.” I said. She looked up at me in surprise, and I pulled her shirt on over my head. “You'll get your own horrible injuries to grope someday.” I added to cut the tension, stepping into her pajama pants and pulling them up. 

“I wasn't going to touch you.” she lied petulantly, standing up straight again. “The fridge light's on in the kitchen, in case you need a drink or anything. I'll see you in the morning, I guess. This is weird.”

I shook my head. “Not that weird.” I answered, getting under the blanket and adjusting the pillow beneath my head. 

Jenny rolled her eyes. “Whatever, fine, it's totally normal to have you of all people sleeping on my couch in my pajamas. Just a regular day, I guess. Anyway, I'll get you up when I'm ready to leave and I can give you a ride to your place before work.”

I gave her a noncommittal grunt instead of a real answer, half because I was mostly asleep and half because I wasn't completely sure what I was going to do the next day. She said a quick “Night” and went off to her room. I let myself shut my eyes and fall asleep to the sound of her bathroom faucet running.

When I woke up next, the apartment was still pitch black. I pulled my phone, fresh and new courtesy of the organization, out of the pocket of my jeans and squinted at it. 4:48 AM, and two unread autotexts from myself at 3:45 and 4:15 waiting on the lockscreen. The autotexts were a habit that was mainly useful when I was undercover and someone might have access to my phone. It's easy to get by a passcode, and almost impossible to tell if someone's done it or not, but if the messages were still there when I woke up, then it was unlikely my phone had been tampered with. 

The best spy trick of all, of course, is to just not do anything incriminating with a phone that other people might have access to.

I put the phone back in my pocket and sat up slowly, acutely aware of the hangover that was well underway. I stood up shakily, pulled my discarded brace back onto my bad knee, and headed into Jenny's bathroom, stopping for a minute to listen to her even breath and gentle snoring through the open bedroom doorway. I snooped through the bathroom carefully. I was glad to see that her medicine cabinet was a doorless niche set into the wall next to the mirror above the sink, but there was nothing interesting in it, save for an out of date Ambien prescription that still had most, if not all, of the pills left in the bottle. She had a .38 in the drawer under the sink, a few back issues of Vogue arranged in a pretty basket hanging off the wall, and expensive shampoo. 

There was a framed photo collage hanging on the back of the door, and I studied it while washing my hands. It was mostly pictures of Jenny with other people, the majority of which looked like they were taken during college, and a cute shot of her as a towheaded child with a missing front tooth and her arms around the neck of a big doberman. There was a picture of what had to be ma and pa Thibodeaux standing, American Gothic-style, in the snowy yard of a big house—Michigan, I guessed, going by the traces of Yooper she hadn't quite gotten rid of--then another in the same spot of them, Jenny, and another almost identical blonde girl with the same Nordic supermodel bone structure as their mother and the same bright green eyes as their father. They were a good-looking family, real smiles and honest closeness in the way they held onto each other. Not the kind of family that breeds people into this line of work. 

I opened the door and was greeted by Jenny's startled face. “I didn't know you were awake. Sorry. God, I'm exhausted.” she told me, scrubbing her hand through her hair. “You can sleep some more if you want. I'm going to head down to the gym, but I'll be back by a quarter to six and I can wake you up when I'm ready to go.”

“You slept like an hour and a half.” I told her, slipping past as she stepped into the bathroom.

“Not even.” she answered through a yawn. “How do you look so alert?” she demanded. 

“Got my hand caught under me when I turned in my sleep.” I lifted my hand to show her my wrapped broken fingers. “Wakes you right up, let me tell you.”

“Oh my god, go to the _hospital_. Look, let me get a shower, and I'll skip the gym and take you there. It's on the way.” Like she sensed she was sounding too friendly, she added, “If you die, I'm screwed on this assignment.”

I smiled at her, which was apparently grotesque enough in the low light that she winced visibly. “Heaven forbid I screw you on this assignment.” I answered, voice light and neutral enough that she could infer what she wanted. 

She blinked at me, cheeks suddenly pink, and stepped fully into the bathroom. “Ugh. Just get ready. I'm dropping you off at the ER.” She shut the door in my face before I could say anything, and I waited until I heard the shower run for a minute before heading back into the living room. I shoved everything but my shoes and jacket into my bag and went into the kitchen. It took me a few minutes to figure out Jenny's ridiculous French press, and I managed to convince it to spit out some coffee by the time she came back, ready for work. She wore a gray wool dress with unseasonably bare legs and black heels, and hung her knee-length burgundy coat on the hook right outside the kitchen.

She grabbed a mason jar half full of something horrible-looking out of her refrigerator, and settled back against the counter with a spoon to eat it. “The hell is that?” I asked over my coffee.

“Overnight oats. You take nut butter, oats, fruit, honey, flaxseed, whatever you want, put it into a jar with some almond milk, and leave it there overnight. In the morning, voila. You've got a good breakfast.” 

“You lost me at nut butter.”

She made a face. “Don't be gross.”

“Tell that to your Quaker nightmare slop.”

She laughed and took another bite of her food. “You figured out the coffeemaker?” she asked, gesturing to the French press.

“I think it threatened to absorb my carbon-based body as robot fuel, but yeah, I got it.”

“Impressive.” she said, taking the last bite out of the jar and rinsing it in the sink before putting it and the spoon in her dishwasher. She filled her thermal cup with coffee , stirred in two creams and three sugars, and disappeared to brush her teeth. I put on my shoes and jacket before she came back with her work bag and pulled her own coat on, gesturing for me to follow her out. I brought my coffee with me, dumped into a second travel cup I'd found in a cabinet, and we walked out of the building and into the thankfully heated parking garage together at six a.m. on the dot.

I felt strange. A little sick from the drinking and pizza and lack of sleep, probably, but talking to Jenny in her kitchen, wearing her pajamas, when I'd played out the same scene with Nadia not five days before, was oddly uncomfortable. I remained silent for the entire ride to the hospital. Jenny pulled into the ER cul de sac and asked if I wanted her to walk up with me, but I answered in the negative and got out of the car, tensing involuntarily against the frigid gust of damp wind and hissing through my teeth at the pressure that put on my injuries. “I'll text you later?” Jenny asked, leaning over the passenger's seat. 

“Sure.” I answered. “Thanks for the couch and the ride.”

“Not a problem. Shut the door, it's cold out there.”

I shut it and started walking up to the ER doors. She waited for me to go inside, and when I reached the empty desk, I looked back and saw her still watching me. I gave her a sarcastic thumb's up and she returned it with an obnoxious fake smile before driving off. I turned to leave again, but the desk nurse happened to see me and I blew my chance at making a subtle exit. “How can I help you?” he asked.

“I'm fine.” I answered automatically. “Got lost on my way to IHOP.”

The nurse squinted at my leg. “Is that a horse brace?”

+++++

+

I ended up with a hearty series of lectures from Anjali Sharma (my usual organization-appointed medical consultant, called in on her day off to fix all the things I did wrong at the hospital and posing as a social worker so as to allay any and all suspicions of me being anything but a random wreck off the street) on everything from mixing alcohol and stolen painkillers, to stealing painkillers, to lying on hospital admission forms.

Lying badly, anyway. 

“None of this could have plausibly resulted from a car accident and your name obviously isn't Cher Horowitz, you idiot. They know what collision victims look like! They have access to enough state and national databases that they can check these things, Wiley!”

“Sorry, doc, I panicked.” I said, scratching idly at the tape around my IV site and hoping my face looked contrite. It was hard to tell what was going on when they gave me the good drugs.

She narrowed her eyes. “ _You_ don't panic.” 

“Why not? It's a normal human response to stimuli. It can happen when someone gets stressed enough. I'm pretty fucking stressed, considering my current and recent situation.”

Anjali flipped through my medical chart, annoyed. “You don't panic because you don't have normal human responses to _anything_ , Ileana.” Her face softened a little as she sat down in the pink vinyl chair next to the hospital bed. She dropped the chart back into the little chart holder at the foot of it, and fixed me with her Serious Yet Sympathetic Doctor face. It was the one that I imagined she'd perfected in the RAF, where she spent most of her time in Bosnia, giving people really bad news while under heavy fire. “I had your fake information changed to more believable fake information. Kincade wrote them a big enough check that it's up to you if you want to go home or stay here a few days. You might get some rest with people who can actually take care of you, since you can't seem to manage it yourself.”

“I want to leave but I don't have a bed.” I said, likely sounding like I was trying and failing to talk my way through an algebraic proof. 

“You're in a bed now. So if that's an issue, why don't you stay?”

I lowered the head of my bed to the sleeping position and turned onto my less injured side. “Fine. But only because it's your expert medical advice. And because they had good pudding here last time.”

“Last time you were hospitalized here, all you could eat was pudding. Imagine the vast array of solid foods they have to offer.” Anjali stood up, folding her arms as she looked down at me. “I'm sorry this happened to you. I can make you an appointment with Dr. Lee for next week.”

“I don't need therapy!”

“You need counseling. You need someone to talk to. No man is an island and all that nonsense.”

“Did you ever get therapy after your discharge?” I asked accusingly.

“It's a different situation.” Anjali began, but stopped and seemed to consider her answer. Her folded arms tightened together almost imperceptibly. “The physical therapy served me better than the psychological therapy, but I still got some use out of it. I don't black out when I hear a child start screaming anymore. I've stopped dreaming about cutting off my other leg to trade for the one I lost.” She shrugged, then smiled sadly. “My daughter is no longer afraid I'll shove her under the kitchen table and keep her there for two hours every time a firecracker goes off or when my neighbor watches a war film with the volume up.”

I could have answered, like Anjali expected me to, but I could tell she didn't _want_ me to. So I didn't. She put her hand on my shoulder as a goodbye and walked out of the room, leaving me alone with my thoughts. Unfortunately, that wasn't where I wanted to be, so I turned on the television and watched PBS until I drifted off, aided by drugs and the darkened chill of the room.

I wasn't woken up again until the evening rounds at eight o'clock, when a nursing assistant took my vitals and brought me Salisbury steak to eat. 

“Pudding's way better.” I told him, spitting my first gristly bite into a napkin and dropping it onto the full tray as he adjusted my IV stand. “Did you ever have the pudding?”

“I'm allergic.” he told me. “I'll take your word for it, though.” 

I wasn't hungry enough to choke down the meal, so I sent the tray back with him on his way out. I reached under the mattress for my phone and cleared the 11:45 am and 6:15 pm autotexts away. I tried to remotely access WHISPR's internal server to see if I could dig up anything on Nadia's status, but her password had been disabled and hacking had never been my forte. I had the stupid idea to call Mt. Sinai and ask about her, but hung up as soon as the operator answered, feeling guilty and sweaty about it.

Way too sweaty, actually. The room was 72 at the highest. When I kicked off my blanket, I saw that most of my visible skin was flushed. I immediately ripped the tape off and eased the IV needle out of my hand. I grabbed the water pitcher off the bedside table, dumped the remaining water into the cup and stuck my fingers down my throat to vomit up whatever I might have ingested. I put the lid back on the pitcher and got up, rinsed my mouth with water from the tap and used the toothbrush and mouthwash out of the toiletry kit that Anjali had brought for me. Then I got back into bed. I waited a few minutes to let the post-vomit disorientation clear up, stretched as well as I could, and hit the nurse call button on the side of the bed. 

The same nursing assistant as before came about five minutes after. I had the needle taped to my hand. “Hey, I barfed.” I told him casually, indicating the pitcher. He smiled reassuringly and put the entire thing into one of the biohazard bags in the top drawer, disappearing briefly into the hallway to dispose of it. I was out of the bed by the time he came back. 

“You should stay in bed.” he said, coming around to help me back into it. As soon as he was within range, I pulled the tape up and broke his nose with my elbow, shoving him facefirst onto the bed and wrapping the plastic tubing from the IV around his neck. It wasn't made to garotte someone, had a tensile strength just a little tougher than a Twizzler, but it held long enough for me to pull the gun out of the holster on his lower back and plant the muzzle at the base of his skull. 

“I was _supposed_ to be _resting_.” I hissed, jerking him up and turning him around to sit on the bed. His face was absolutely fucked, his eyes swelling shut and the rest of it covered in blood down to the collar of his scrubs. I kept the gun on him as I walked to the door and pushed it closed. They didn't lock from the inside for patient safety reasons, so I stood next to it, listening with my good ear. “Who do you work for?”

“They hired me over email. I don't know.”

“What did they hire you to do?”

“Kill you.”

“What did you put in the IV bag?”

“Ketamine. Some other stuff. I don't know, they left the bottle in a the actual nurse guy's locker and told me to get it into you somehow.”

He was telling the truth. He didn't know much, and questioning him further wouldn't be of any use. “Take off your clothes.” I said. He stared at me in confusion, so I took an aggressive step forward. “Take them off or I will take them off your dead fucking body” He did as he was told, dropping them on the chair next to the bed. I slid my gown off one-handed and threw it to him. “Put that on and get under the covers.” He hesitated again, so I moved forward again, back to his side. “Look, buddy, this'll work just as well if you're a corpse.” 

He put the gown on and got on the bed. I saw him reach for the nurse call button and cracked the butt of his gun into the side of his head, putting him out for real. I taped the needle to his hand and arranged him underneath the blanket. I pulled on the scrubs and emptied the bullets from the gun, pocketing them and tossing the gun itself into the drawer before gathering up my belongings and sticking them into my duffel bag. I left the door open when I exited the room, banking on that giving me some extra time to get some distance, since nobody questions an open door. I used the smoothest gait I could manage in my new knee brace (for human knees this time) as I passed the nurse's station, waving at the lady sitting there on my way to the elevators. She was on the phone and waved back distractedly.

The door to the stairwell told me I was on the ninth floor. I thought about the stairs, but it would take me half an hour to get down them without falling, so I stepped onto the elevator as it opened. Everything was smooth sailing until it stopped on the sixth floor and two burly porters and a security guard on their way out to a smoke break stepped in. All of them clocked my bloody, too-big scrubs and destroyed face immediately and very obviously. 

One of the porters went for the emergency phone in the wall panel, but I ripped it completely out of its compartment before he could get to it, smashing the receiver into his face so hard it knocked him into the opposite wall. I jerked my bag up, getting it between the guard's stun gun and my chest and jerking his arm down hard with the strap. The stun gun clattered to the floor and I stepped on it, then slammed his face down into my good knee and shoved him back into the first porter. The second one tried to grab me from the side, but I was already kneeling down to retrieve the zapper and swing it up into his balls. A three second jolt knocked him out cold. 

The guard was unconscious but the first porter was yelling into the guard's radio for help. I kicked him in the face to shut him up. The doors opened into the lobby and I slipped out, ducking into the gift shop fifteen feet away and switching the scrub shirt out for a pastel blue t-shirt, emblazoned with the words NEW DADDY and a smiling, dancing teddybear underneath. The hallway headed toward the cafeteria was closer than the front doors, which would have been locked already, so I made the calm but brisk walk down the hall, through the cafeteria, and back into the kitchens. Someone yelled for me to stop, but I pushed through the emergency door and out into the back lot, which was fenced in and full of dumpsters. I climbed unsteadily onto the closest one and did my best to make an easy landing on the other side of the fence, but ended up inside the freezing retention pond when I lost my balance on the wet grass. 

Fully awake in a way I had probably never been in my life, I managed to get past the treeline beyond the parking lot before I heard the police sirens arrive. I made my way to the access road behind the hospital before I took out my phone, thanking every single deity I could think of that the equipment specialists had finally listened to my suggestions and put waterproof cases on all the company cells. I had a text from Jenny when the screen lit up, and I called her without reading it.

“Hey, I just texted y--” she said.

“I need you to get to the access road behind the hospital ASAP.”

She was silent for a second. “Wh--”

“Access road.” I barked, and ended the call. I started walking in the direction of faint car noises, shivering uncontrollably. I gave it five minutes before Kincade was on the phone, but it only took three. I considered not taking the call, but I knew we had a satellite up somewhere, and I couldn't be totally sure it wasn't equipped with some kind of laser that could fry me from space.

“You're becoming a liability.” she said quietly.

I sighed, more like a grunt between the cold and breathlessness. “Somebody tried to kill me.”

“Since when does that matter? You solve your problem with minimal _fuss_ and you get free. You do not create collateral damage because collateral damage gets you _caught_.”

“There were three people who knew I was there and two who knew what room I was in, and I think finding out who the fuck is responsible for me almost getting horse tranquilizered to death is more important than you lecturing me about how I kept that from happening.”

“What's wrong with you, Ileana?” Kincade asked, voice still quiet and even. 

I stopped walking, furious. “What's _wrong_ with me?” I repeated.

“Yes, what's wrong with you. You came back from New York acting like you were dumped at the prom.”

I almost spluttered at her but maintained my composure. “Are you _fucking_ kidding me?” I ground out. “Even if I was acting like that, which I'm definitely not, don't you think I've earned the right to mourn for a minute? I'm a human being. I was with Nadia for three years and it ended with us shooting each other. Even if it was an assignment, I still—it still--” I stopped talking, unsure of how to finish the sentence without digging myself deeper into the cesspit of embarrassment I was feeling.

Kincade wasted no time filling the silence with an accusatory “You loved her. You fell in love with your mark and you think you're still in love with her.”

“My cover was in love with her.” It sounded weak. I sounded weak. 

“You've always been awful at finding the line, though, haven't you.” 

The fury came on so fast, I could feel the stitches in my mouth pull as I snarled. “That's why you hired me in the first place! After eleven years of exploiting this fucking--this personality defect, it doesn't work out exactly the way you think it should, and that's my fault?”

“I'm glad you understand the situation so thoroughly. Get back to the office. We need to have a discussion.”

“Great. See you soon, chief.” I grumbled into the phone, and hung up on her. My heart was beating so fast that I felt like throwing up again. There was a very real chance I'd just thrown my entire life away, that I'd turn thirty in a couple of months and suddenly be in the exact same place I was at nineteen. It was even possible I'd go back to prison—Kincade, in her endless quest to control every aspect of the world that it was feasibly possible for her to control, had never given me the details of how she got me out. I, in my endless quest to never have to give a shit about anything, had never asked how she'd done it. 

I'd barely even asked why. Prisons are full of good liars in bad situations, but to my knowledge, there were only two operatives in the organization other than me who'd come from a correctional facility, and they'd both served their entire sentences before she brought them in. Neither of them worked in the field, either. 

I sat down on the side of the road, suddenly close to despondent. It didn't matter if Kincade was right or if I was right and I had earned my breakdown. Something was very, very wrong with me, and on top of that, I'd been ratted out and almost killed twice in less than a week. I didn't have time to mull over it, because I heard Jenny's car pull up behind me. I didn't get up, so she got out and knelt down beside me. 

“Are you all right?” she asked. “Kincade told me I have to bring you to the office as soon as I pick you up.”

“Yeah, she told me that, too.”

“Are you going to get in the car, or...” Jenny's tone was as inscrutable as she could make it, but I heard the “am I going to have to put you in the car, probably the trunk, probably with another gunshot wound?” as clear as if she'd actually finished the sentence. 

I didn't have many options. I didn't want to kill her and I wouldn't make it very far without doing that, so I let her pull me up and walk me carefully to the passenger's side. “You're soaked.” she told me as she helped me sit. “New daddy?”

“It's been an exciting day for me.” I muttered, letting my head fall back on the headrest. Jenny shut the door and got into the driver's seat, and we drove to the office in silence. 

The building was mostly empty, which was unusual. The only activity in any of the main work areas was the cleaning crew. Jenny followed me to Kincade's office, no doubt tasked with playing warden until there was no possible way for me to escape. Not that I was going to try. I had the instinct to run, the lizard-brain fear of being in a situation I had absolutely no control over and that could end badly for me in a thousand different ways, but I also knew that making an escape attempt would definitely end only one way for me, and that way was also bad. 

“Sit down.” Kincade said when I stepped into her office. “Jenny, you can go home. Shut the door.”

“I--” Jenny began. Kincade looked up at her over the top of her glasses, and Jenny left immediately, closing the door as softly as she could. The city glittered in the darkness behind Kincade. The only light in the office was the old-fashioned desk lamp, and it cast strange shadows over her as she stepped around the desk to perch casually on the corner. 

“Sit.” she repeated.

“I'm not a dog.”

“You're what I tell you to be. Sit down before I sit you down.” 

I dropped my bag and stepped around to take a seat. It brought me close to Kincade and let her look down at me, which was her favorite way to deal with people she didn't like. I'd spent enough time leaning against the windows behind her, a silent witness or threat, to have seen this exact scene play out hundreds of times. It was intimidating from this vantage point, and I understood why some of the most powerful people in the world had wilted in the exact chair I was in. 

She let me stew. I didn't say a word, didn't rise to her bait, and even though she spoke first I still felt like I lost whatever contest we were having. “I don't tolerate failure and I don't tolerate disloyalty.” she told me. “You're lucky that you've never failed me.” She wanted me to say something, so I didn't. “Why do you think you're here?”

“You started this party. Why do _you_ think I'm here?”

Kincade sighed and took her glasses off, folding them carefully and setting them on the desk behind her. “Your value to me has always been more than as an employee. You're not a tool I use, you're a weapon I deploy, and as such, you're specialized and irreplaceable. But sometimes, in the fray, we lose things. Our weapons break, or they're taken from us by our enemies. Or they turn on us, either because we've misused them, or they're malfunctioning, or just _bad luck_.”

Something told me I needed to start defending myself, groveling for forgiveness even though I hadn't done anything wrong. Something else told me it was too late. 

Kincade continued, “I'm going to let you tell me which one it is. Understand that if you were anyone else, you'd be dead.”

I shook my head. “There's no conspiracy. I need a break, Kincade. It's got nothing to do with you or loyalty or whatever you want to be happening right now. Your weapon needs a fucking nap. You know, like you suggested yesterday.”

“We've moved beyond that. Your behavior has been erratic since you returned, and if it was just that, then we wouldn't be having this conversation.” Kincade paused, and picked up a dark red folder off of her desk. “Your calls to James Verity became less frequent in the last four months of your assignment, yielded less information, and he noted several times that his equipment picked up vocal stress anomalies that hadn't been present at the beginning of the assignment. This could all be accounted for by the depth of your cover and length of the operation wearing on you, which—while regrettable—can happen to the best of us.” She held the folder out to me. “This doesn't.” 

I took the folder reluctantly, flipping it open. Inside was several pages full of call logs between the same two numbers. One of the numbers was Nadia's. I didn't recognize the other. I looked up at Kincade, and she said, “Nadia Daramy had been in regular contact with James Verity since the beginning of your operation, starting about three weeks after you first made contact with her face-to-face.”

I stared at her, dumbfounded. Then I shook my head. “No, that isn't possible. If she knew why I was there, she never would have let me get close to her. And nothing I ever got from her and passed to you turned out to be wrong or useless--I basically took WHISPR's balls and set them in your fucking hand.” I threw the folder back onto the desk, scattering pages. “Besides, I would have known. Verity might have ratted me but it wasn't at the start of the op, that doesn't make any goddamn sense. I'll grant you that I didn't keep myself in check as well as I usually do and it may have clouded some things toward the end, but I'm not an oblivious fucking idiot, and neither of them could have lied to me for that long.”

“Or they didn't lie to you, and you're lying to me now.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Absolutely not.” She watched me like a leopard watches a gazelle, curious and hungry but secure in the knowledge she'd have what she wanted soon. 

I shook my head again. “I'm sorry, Kincade, I don't know what you want me to say. I did what I was asked to do, and I did it right, and I gave you every single thing you asked for. Someone tipped Nadia off. If it was James Verity, he's dead now. If it was me, if I was careless, it was my mistake and I'm paying for it. It definitely wasn't on fucking _purpose_. So to answer your first question, no, I was not disloyal to you. I'm not broken, I wasn't taken, and I haven't turned against the organization.” 

Kincade kept watching me, face impassive, for a long time. Finally she broke eye contact, pushing off the edge of the desk to lean down close, her hands on the arms of the chair. She stared at me for a second, then moved in even further, mouth so close to my ear I could feel her lips brush against my hair when she whispered “You really should have let Nadia kill you.”

I shoved her back immediately, but she hit me in the face hard enough to send the entire chair down sideways. I rolled out of it but I couldn't see, I could barely breathe, and she grabbed me by the hair, dragged me a couple of feet, and bashed my head into the front of the desk three times before I could get my arm around her leg and yank it out from under her. She grabbed her lamp on the way down and smashed it over my head. I got a handful of the glass into her face and punched her. It connected hard with her jaw and the glass tore both of us up so badly I couldn't tell whose blood was making a bigger mess of the floor. She twisted around and got me in a chokehold, arm over my neck from behind, her heel threatening to stab through my femoral artery where she pinned me on top of her. I caught her ankle between my thighs and hurled myself sideways, turning into her as we flipped and landing a rib-breaking blow on her side when her arm loosened enough for me to rip myself away. She gasped, her hand immediately going to the broken bone. I reached for my duffel bag but she grabbed my ankle and jerked me back under her, one hand on my throat and the other trying to gouge my eye. I hit her in the ribs again and she screamed, giving me time to throw her off of me, grab my bag, and snatch the stun gun out of it. 

In the three seconds it took me to get it out, she had picked up the remains of the lamp and was swinging the heavy brass base down. I blocked it with my arm but lost the stun gun when it went flying into one of the dark corners of the office. I kicked out, my boot connecting hard with her shin and then her chest when she fell. She coughed, spitting blood, and I tackled her down onto her back. “ _Why_?” I growled, punctuating the question with the nastiest punch I could manage.

“You—fuck, I forgot how hard you hit—you became worth more to them than to me. Worth enough for me to retire on. You should be flattered.” She laughed at the horror I could feel crawl across my face and reached up. She didn't hit me, just brushed her fingers gently through my hair in a motherly gesture. “The spy business is a _business_ , Ileana.” she said softly, like that excused everything. It was a testament to the past eleven years of loyalty that I didn't start hitting her and not stop until I was just grinding bone fragments into the carpet, and a testament to the number she'd done on me in that time that I slid away from her, crying. 

She pulled herself up with an unusually undignified grunt, and propped herself up against the desk, hand hovering gingerly over her side. “They're going to take you, and they're going to wring everything out of you, and then they're probably going to kill you. Then they're going to use all that intel to dismantle everything I've built here from the ground up, absorb what they can use, and destroy the rest. Then they're going to assassinate the very shocked and devastated Andrea Kincade.”

“Then what, Jane Smith is gonna live out her days in a mansion in Aruba?”

Kincade smiled, almost fondly. “Santorini.”

“Fuck you.”

“I know it doesn't mean much now, but I'm proud of what I made from that raw clay I found in Oklahoma.” I couldn't answer her because there was no way to respond. I curled in on myself, pulling my knees up to hunch into them like if I got as small as possible, it would let me disappear. “They're here now. I'd advise going quietly and not prolonging your own suffering when they interrogate you.”

“Nobody else knows you sold them out?”

“A few key personnel WHISPR thought might be useful acquisitions. Verity knew.”

I thought of his last moments, spent gurgling on his own blood. 

At least there was that.

“Daramy didn't, for what it's worth.” Kincade added. “They played her too. We had to keep the two of you out of the way while we laid the groundwork for this...great upheaval.” Kincade could lead a cult if she wanted. Hell, the organization might as well have been her Jonestown at this point.

I heard people enter and walk through the workspace outside the office. Heavy steps, like combat boots and body armor, and a lot of them. I got to my feet and reached behind me to lock the office door. I walked across the office, watching Kincade eye me warily, then with surprise when I passed her and didn't attack her again. I opened the top drawer of her desk and pulled the gun out. “What are you doing?” she asked, struggling to her feet. I pointed the gun at her, and she lifted the hand that wasn't holding her ribs to try and placate me. 

I turned and fired, two shots into the window until it shattered enough that I could put her desk chair through it. She was yelling at me, and I heard men shouting outside the office, but my ears were roaring. I slipped out over the windowframe without overthinking the fact that we were on the seventh floor—there was no fire escape, so nobody would think to guard this side of the building. I also had no doubt that Kincade had assured WHISPR I'd be easy to take, once she ruined my life. 

I stopped to think for a second. The glass wasn't bulletproof despite the fact that the rest of the windows in the building were, even though this was arguably the most dangerous place to be in the event of a sniper. I went back to the desk, noting Kincade's barely-contained look of annoyance, and found the rope ladder in the second drawer I tried. It hooked onto the small, subtle metal loops just outside the window with carabiners, which I attached. I turned back to Kincade. “If you touch these, I'll blow your hands off.” I warned. She didn't say anything, just scowled at me. 

I threw my bag out the window and got down the ladder as best I could, dropping the last few feet when my bad hand couldn't take the pressure of holding onto it. I stalked out of the alley as quickly as I could, only to end up nearly in the arms of about ten members of WHISPR's security force. There were at least the same amount of men still inside the building. Like cockroaches, I figured there were many more hiding out than I could confirm visually. It was almost flattering.

They all raised their weapons at once. “Ileana Wiley, you are under arrest by authority of the Department of Homeland Security and are to be taken into custody of WHISPR. Do you resist?” the closest one demanded through the riot shield mask on his helmet.

I dropped my bag and raised my arms. “No, sir, I do not.” I said loudly and clearly. 

“Disappointing. Lace your fingers behind your head. Gilbert, secure the suspect.” 

Before I could figure out which one Gilbert was, there was the unmistakable shriek of overworked brakes and a pair of high beams hurtling toward me. I threw myself backwards and kept rolling until I heard the crash-crunch of ten men getting plowed into the side of a building by a BMW. In the aftermath, I heard high, muffled screaming, and realized very quickly that it wasn't any of the remaining pieces of WHISPR operative left scattered all over the sidewalk. It was Jenny. 

“Holy shit.” I muttered, struggling to my feet. Jenny was still screaming, her eyes squeezed shut and her hands so tight on the wheel that her knuckles looked ready to split open and start bleeding. I picked up the closest gun and tapped it against her window. “Down.” I ordered.

She stopped screaming and started hyperventilating as she rolled the window down. “Dead—they all--” she began, but squeaked and stopped talking when I pointed the gun at her.

“What. The fuck.” I said, reaching in to unlock the door and jerking it open. I didn't have time to pistol-whip an answer out of her, unfortunately, because gunfire started raining down from all around us and she grabbed me, yanking me into the car. We spent a few seconds kicking and elbowing each other as she dove into the passenger's seat and relinquished the wheel to me, taking my bag and throwing it into the backseat. I pulled driver's side door shut as a bullet ripped through the upholstery an inch below my thigh and threw the gearshift into reverse, rolling back over whatever bodies or body parts had ended up behind the car and tearing off down the street. The bullets hadn't hit anything that would crap out within the next five minutes, so I focused on getting on the quickest, furthest, and most convoluted route away from the building I could. 

As soon as I was reasonably certain nobody had caught our trail yet, I turned to Jenny. She was slumped in the seat, one hand shaking in her lap while the other was busy getting its expensive manicure chewed all to hell. She was also dressed in the dark green jumpsuit uniform the cleaning staff wore, complete with a baseball cap hiding all her blonde hair. 

“I didn't leave.” she said, before I could start talking. “Kincade told me to leave but I didn't leave. I waited until I heard the trucks pull up. It sounded off, so I looked out the window and I saw all the WHISPR guys piling out, and I thought, oh, that's not good, so I paid the guy vacuuming a hundred dollars for his uniform and hat, and then all the stormtroopers just stomped in past me, and then I heard you and Kincade start fighting, and I thought, oh, that's _really_ not good, so I snuck back down and got in my car...I wanted to go home, I really did, but I waited, trying to come up with reasons WHISPR might be able to just stroll into our building, totally armed for bear no less, and I couldn't think of any. And I swear, I was getting ready to just drive home, but then you came out of the alley and it was like—I don't know. Everything seemed wrong. So I...” Jenny trailed off with a sob. “Oh my god, oh my god, I just killed all those men!”

“There were a couple of them still alive, probably.” I told her. “It's really hard to kill ten people with one car when they're spread out like that.” Her head shot up and she looked at me, mascara running down her horrified face. I lifted the gun again, then set it back down in my lap, keeping it pointed at her with my left hand while I steered with my right. “Don't take this personally, because I'm grateful you killed all those guys—” I paused to let her make a distressed noise and shove her face into her hands. “Killed some of those guys, and I'm very grateful you saved my ass, but I have had a very difficult few hours, and I've made the executive decision to not trust anyone who isn't me right now.”

“That's fair.” Jenny said shakily into her palms. 

“As a token of my gratitude, I can swing by your apartment and drop you off. I'm keeping your car, though. It's better for both of us that way, trust me. The less you know about this whole situation the better. Plausible deniability.”

“Why was WHISPR about to arrest you?” Jenny asked, pulling her hands away from her face to curl up nervously in her lap. “Why were you fighting with Kincade?”

“Do you know what plausible deniability means?”

“I drove my car—my car, which they will know was mine—into a bunch of WHISPR agents, and rescued someone they were trying to take into custody. They're going to kill me.”

I shook my head, but I couldn't quite verbalize the lie. I sighed. “Yeah, probably.” I agreed. “Stop making that noise, you sound like a sad elephant.”

“I can't help it! My life is over! I'm a fugitive from justice and it's all because of someone I don't even like!”

“First of all, wow. Second of all, your gut instinct's usually the right one, and it was right today.” 

I gave her the Cliff's Notes version of what Kincade had told me, mainly because I didn't have any other insight on the situation myself. Thankfully, Jenny put it together quickly enough that I didn't have to explain it five times, and having the pertinent information seemed to pull her out of her wallow a bit. 

“I just want to say that I understand why you can't trust anyone, but I'm not in on it.” she told me eventually. “In fact I'm pretty pissed off that they didn't even approach me, honestly. Sorry.” she added when she saw the face I made. “I mean—you know what I mean.” She pulled the visor down and started wiping the streaked makeup off her face with the cuff of the jumpsuit. “What now?”

“Well, we're both fucked. By now they know it was your car, and Kincade's been trying to call you for fifteen minutes.”

“What?” I set the gun down in the little pocket at the bottom of the driver's-side door and rolled down the window, then extracted the phone I'd stolen from her while she was pulling me into the car out of the waistband of the scrub pants. The screen lit up with an eighth missed call notification. “Hey, that's-- _hey_!” she yelled as I threw the phone out the window. 

“GPS. They'll be able to track your car, too, so we need to ditch it and find a new one.” I told her. I made a right and sped up the on-ramp to pull out onto the highway. I glanced down at the clock, which read 10:26 pm. Between the physical trauma, emotional trauma, and the fact that I hadn't had a full uninterrupted, uninjured, and undrugged night's sleep since my last night as Lauren Velasco nine days before, my internal clock was stuck at a quarter past basically dead. “We'll pull in at the next truckstop.”

“And then what?”

I had the skeletons of three or four plans floating around in my head, but the bog of my exhaustion kept sucking them back down every time I tried to flesh them out. “I don't know. I need to think.” 

We rode in silence for a while. At a quarter to ten, Jenny said “Next exit. Flying J.” 

I got into the right lane. “What's the daily withdrawal limit on your ATM card?” I asked.

“Why?”

“You need cash. If they haven't frozen your accounts, they're going to.”

“How the hell can they do that?”

“Like you said, you're now a fugitive from justice. I've got about three hundred dollars left, and there's no way of knowing how long it'll last.”

Jenny made a frustrated sound and let her head drop against the window with a thud. I pulled off the highway at the exit and then into the parking lot of the truckstop, off to the side of the main building. I slipped the gun into my bag and Jenny and I stepped out into the chilly night. 

“If there's anything you need, get it out of the car.” I ordered, shouldering my duffel. Jenny grabbed her laptop bag out of the backseat and the outfit she switched out for the cleaner's uniform and shut the door, placing her hand on the roof. “What are you doing?”

“My parents got me this car as a graduation present. It was kind of a shitheap, but I'd wanted one just like this since I was a little kid. My family and I fixed it up together the summer before I left for college.” she told me, then broke contact with the BMW and scrubbed her hand up and down her face. “Am I ever going to get to see them again?”

“You want me to tell the truth or make you feel better?”

She chuckled darkly. “Make me feel better.”

“It's going to be fine. You'll have a fun story to tell them in a couple weeks when this all blows over.”

“You're horrible at making people feel better.”

I shrugged slightly and pocketed the keys to the car, rapping my knuckles on the hood as I passed it. “You're too smart to want to feel better.” The face she made let me know I was right, but she wasn't happy about it. 

Jenny followed me into the truckstop and back to the restrooms. I pulled her into one of the large stalls and shut the door. “Listen,” I began quietly. “We've got a little time. I need a shower, and we both need to eat.” I pulled a twenty out my bag and handed it to her. “Go to the food place next door and get something hot. Carbs and protein. I'll meet you when I'm done.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked, taking the money from me.

“Shower. Think.”


End file.
